No, Google Did Not Steal The Election

Wow, Report Just Out! Google manipulated from 2.6 million to 16 million votes for Hillary Clinton in 2016 Election! This was put out by a Clinton supporter, not a Trump Supporter! Google should be sued. My victory was even bigger than thought! @JudicialWatch

Fact-checkers have already been all over this. Politifact, CNN and WaPo all have fact checkers, disputing this claim. Among other things, Trump is mischaracterizing the research, which claimed that 2.6-10.4 million voters may have been influenced by Google search results to vote for Clinton instead of Trump. The research doesn’t claim that Google manipulated voters because … well, Google can’t do that.

Those are all good fact checks and I recommend them. But I don’t think any of them really get to the heart of the problem here. The problem is one of extrapolation. The claim comes from psychologist Robert Epstein, who has testified before Congress on the subject. Epstein’s chain of logic goeth thusly:

First, he and his researchers have previously claimed that search engine results can have a significant effect on elections, swinging undecided voters by as much as 20% or more. Four of their experiments involved asking volunteers in the United States to judge candidates in Australia’s election based on search engine results, with the search engines canted to favor one candidate or the other. The other involved having voters in India’s 2014 election give their impressions of candidates before and after using a search engine canted to give biased results. “Biased” in both studies meant preferentially linking to articles critical of one or the other candidate. They found that after using the biased search engines, the voters were more likely to favor the candidate with more positive search engine results.

While the study is kind of interesting on its own, using it as a basis to extrapolate anything in the real world is, to put it mildly, insanity. The number of San Diego voters who know anything about Australian politics is effectively nil. Google search results would be literally the first thing they had ever learned about the candidates. The India study is a bit more relevant in that respect, but it also suffers from the same fundamental problem: it’s not clear how those impressions translate into actual votes. Someone’s vote in an election can be affected by many things: news stories, video clips, debate performances, conversations with friends. Claiming that a fleeting impressions based on a search engine propagates to a vote in a predictable manner is suspect, to say the least.

Moreover, this says nothing about the millions and millions of voters who never use a search engine to learn about the candidates. I’m a political junkie; I was blogging every day during the 2016 election. I’m not sure I Googled “Donald Trump” or “Hillary Clinton” even once. Neither of my parents is a political junkie but they vote. And I doubt they Googled either candidate. Most of what they learned, they learned from television news (Fox News in one case; BBC America in the other).

And even putting those objections aside, it’s still not clear at all what this says about the 2016 election. India’s election ran on a time scale of about six months. Opinion polling didn’t even start until three months before the election began. Australia’s election took place on an even shorter time scale. In both cases, most people were only roughly familiar with the candidates. You simply can not compare that to the grueling death march that was the 2016 US election, which ran for almost two years and involved two of the most famous people on the planet. Very few people had to Google Donald Trump to know who he was or what he stood for.

Let me be clear: it’s not that the research isn’t interesting; it’s that it has no practical application to the real world and certainly not to the 2016 election.

The second link in this chain is a study published only on a website. Based on a sample of 95 volunteers, they found that Google’s search results in the run-up to the election favored more negative coverage of Trump than Clinton based on crowd-sourcing the analysis to… a bunch of people. But this claim is also incredibly dubious. Google’s search results are personalized and can vary dramatically from voter to voter. Epstein’s sample was hardly representative, having a larger number of undecided voters (20 people, about 21%) than the overall electorate.

Moreover, what exactly does bias mean? Users ranked sites based on negative or positive coverage. But that’s not necessarily bias. Epstein’s survey covered the 25 days before the election. If a candidate were having a negative news cycle — like, say, an audio tape of him boasting about sexually assaulting women had broken just before the study began — you would expect the coverage to be “biased”. Epstein finds it suspicious that the bias dropped after the election. But that makes sense because the news coverage shifted from horserace stories about Trump’s numerous scandals to stories about the transition and the negative reaction of Clinton supporters to the result.

Google search results can also be “biased” because the most pro-Trump sites were opinion sites like Breitbart, not news sites. Notably, Epstein finds that the “bias” increases as one goes down the list of search results. But what is that but a shifting from news sites to opinion sites? The first hit on the Google searches doesn’t appear to have been “biased” at all.

And, once again, there is no way of knowing how this translates into actual votes. There’s no way of knowing whether those undecided voters actually changed their votes based on search results. Or how many voters were even using search results.

Which brings us finally to the third link in this rusted chain of unreason. If you take the results of the first study and multiply it by the second, you get 5% of the votes being swung by search results. But multiplying two dubious studies by each other does not produce good social science; it produces junk science because any of the objections raised in this entire chain of reasoning can sink the entire result. The claim that so many votes were swung is based on a giant pile of assumptions, a cat’s cradle of humbug. And pulling any thread in the cradle causes the entire thing to unravel.

What if you can’t extrapolate Americans’ opinions of Aussie election to American’s opinions of American elections? What if you can’t extrapolate Indian elections to American ones? What if people’s impressions after a Google search are disconnected from their final votes? What if your sample of 95 people — NINETY-FIVE PEOPLE OUT OF 130 MILLION VOTERS — was biased in some way? What if the people who analyzed the bias in search engine results were themselves biased? What if reality has a liberal bias because Trump had a huge scandal break right as the study began? Each and every one of these questions introduces uncertainties far greater than the plus-or-minus five million Epstein is claiming. He’s telling us to ignore the raging sea and concentrate on a glass of water.

This is one the classic methods of junk science — multiplying humbug by humbug, extrapolating upward and onward until you get dramatic conclusions that defy any common sense (I once addressed, in depth, a similar chain of unreasoning that claimed that rape pregnancies were rare). You take assumption after assumption, bias after bias until all you’ve got is noise that you insist is a signal. Note the absurd precision: 2.6 million is the “rock bottom” number of votes that Google influenced. No responsible social scientist would ever make such a precise claim. Certainly not based on … again … 95 voters.

Of course, this goes beyond the social science. It’s no accident that the Republicans and Trump have been all over this at a time when they are both targeting tech companies for heavy-handed, even tyrannical regulation and insisting that Democrats are trying to steal elections. I think Trump sees this bogus study as two-fer: he can claim political bias in tech companies and delegitimize the 2020 election in advance.

It is very dangerous territory for a president to be treading on. And everyone — Republican or Democrat — should be pushing back on it as hard as possible. Our political system depends on trust. We have to trust that electoral results are valid. If Trump succeeds in destroying that trust, the collapse of the system will not be far behind.

I don’t think Trump is deliberately undermining electoral legitimacy as some sort of grand conspiracy. I think this is mainly to assuage his giant ego. Trump has a history of jumping on garbage claims to pretend he actually won the popular vote in 2016, the loss of which clearly sticks in his craw. But just like a child doesn’t intend to break the glasses when they climb onto a cabinet, his intention doesn’t really matter. What matters is the damage he will do. And making grandiose claims based on dubious science doesn’t help; it merely hands the child a blowtorch.

Well except for the actual proof of one and the actual nothing of the other.

But in case it’s not glaringly obvious. The point of making up the Google thing is purely instrumental as a way to counter the Mueller report thing about the Russian’s messing with the election. It doesn’t t matter if the google stuff is poo, it’s just to create a dueling narrative to muddy the waters. It’s to create some equivalence, false though it may be, to get people to ignore real problems. It’s a distraction tactic.Report

About the third time I read your comment, I realized you weren’t necessarily endorsing the view that there was no Russian meddling. But it can be hard to be sure.

The Russians were certainly trying to influence the election. They spent money on it. There are a dozen indictments of Russian nationals for doing things that were illegal. That ain’t smoke and mirrors. I think it’s an open question how successful they were, but they were trying.

And they also broke into a lot of election support computers. The stories of what they accomplished keep escalating. I’m really hoping you aren’t calling this “fake news”.

Meanwhile, the core issue is that “conservative” media now has a significant overlap with “swindler clickbait” media. So when Google uses it’s crowd-sourced weighting – where sites with lots of links are deemed more credible than those that don’t have them – it looks like bias against conservatives. Really, it’s bias against grift, but apparently there are some inside the bubble who can’t tell the difference.

And yes, I am aware that there are left-leaning clickbait sites, too. Apparently not nearly so many, though.Report

How can you be sure? Do you get to look at the Kremlin budget? Also, the lobbyists for Aruba don’t generally wind up in jail. I mean, sometimes, yeah…

Meanwhile, Trumps campaign manager is up to his neck with Russian oligarch money, and got caught witness tampering. There is clearly obstruction of justice – successful obstruction of justice – involved. How can you possibly be sure you know the amount of money involved?Report

The money the Kremlin spends in Moscow stays hidden, but we get to see what foreign entities spend on lobbying, which can indicate quite a lot about priorities.

If you need to do a bunch of illegal stuff to advance cause X, and you can also do a bunch of legal stuff to advance cause X, rational actors will spend a lot on the legal means of advancing cause X because it’s a priority and legal means are easy to use.

So if you see a country that has easy legal options of advancing a particular set of interests, yet doesn’t do so, then it’s not putting a high value on advancing those interests and is not likely to spending much on illegal means of advancing those interests, either.

You can go to OpenSecrets and track spending by country. Russia spends less on US lobbying than Ireland does.

You’d be right, if they were swallowing the stories on the basis of their credibility. But no one has ever examined either story rationally and come to the opinion that votes were stolen. If they believe either of them, it’s confirmation bias.Report

I think it goes further back. When Trump claimed that the only way he could lose the election was through Russian interference; the media jumped up and down to explain the Russians don’t have the capacity except to sew distrust and delegitimize the democratic process, which would be their actual intention. Trump wins the election and a shocked media claims Russian collusion, spends time arguing about the popular vote, and gives attention to complaints about the electoral college. None of which it would have done if Hillary won.

All of this is just partisan posturing. Partisans by and large don’t care about system integrity, they care about winning.Report

Is it just my internal bias and wish-casting, or does Trump’s Twitter-fu seem to be getting weaker and weaker?

Meaning, that once upon a time most media outlets seemed to take his pronouncements more seriously than they do now. No matter how outlandish things like the birther stuff was, they felt compelled to treat it like it was a normal statement from a reasonable normal politician.

Now it seems more common to either ignore crazy blasts like this, or frame it with contrasting evidence. Like, a statement like this from Obama or Bush would have been front page above the fold for weeks. This will be forgotten by tomorrow morning.

But while we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible during a 10-month investigation, Ms. Ramirez’s story could be more fully corroborated. During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.

At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

Mr. Kavanaugh did not speak to us because we could not agree on terms for an interview. But he has denied Dr. Ford’s and Ms. Ramirez’s allegations, and declined to answer our questions about Mr. Stier’s account.

Second:

Mr. Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings were wrenching, as he strained to defend his character after Dr. Ford’s searing testimony. Thousands of miles away, Ms. Ramirez, who was never asked to testify, also found the hearings distressing. Her efforts to backstop her recollections with friends would later be cited as evidence that her memory was unreliable or that she was trying to construct a story rather than confirm one.

Ms. Ramirez’s legal team gave the F.B.I. a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence. But the bureau — in its supplemental background investigation — interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the F.B.I. on their own.

Two F.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Ramirez, telling her that they found her “credible.” But the Republican-controlled Senate had imposed strict limits on the investigation. “‘We have to wait to get authorization to do anything else,’” Bill Pittard, one of Ms. Ramirez’s lawyers, recalled the agents saying. “It was almost a little apologetic.”

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island and member of the Judiciary Committee, later said, “I would view the Ramirez allegations as not having been even remotely investigated.” Other Democrats agreed.

Ultimately, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, concluded, “There is no corroboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez.” Mr. Kavanaugh was confirmed on Oct. 6, 2018, by a vote of 50-48, the closest vote for a Supreme Court justice in more than 130 years.

It's funny how browsers I think are a thing (specifically Vivaldi and Brave) don't even register on this list. Goes to show my techie bubble.

Browsers used to have better names. Netscape was brilliant. What the heck is a Firefox? (It's "Firebird" with IP considerations is what it is.) Chrome? Edge? Edge? Come on.

It's amazing how quickly Chrome accomplished what Firefox never did. It just goes to show the power of corporate muscle. When Google announced they were creating a browser I thought it was kind of dumb. I was wrong.

People say Firefox is better than Chrome now but I just can't get into the groove of it. Chrome doesn't work right on one of my computers and I use Firefox on it. it's passable, but I wish Chrome worked on it.

With Internet Explorer being replaced by Edge and Edge being Chrome-based, that means may be looking at 3 of the top 5 and 85% of desktop browsing occurring through Chromium browsers. That's concerning.

The ship's presence, he speculated, might have been related to the testing of a nuclear-powered cruise missile.

Did Trump tweet anything about this, you ask?

The United States is learning much from the failed missile explosion in Russia. We have similar, though more advanced, technology. The Russian “Skyfall” explosion has people worried about the air around the facility, and far beyond. Not good!

As some of you know, I lost my father two weeks ago. My mother called me that Friday afternoon and said, in not such direct words, that “you better try to get up here if you can.”

I did, but I was too late. But in the aftermath of it, it was good to be there. My mother and I ate together for two weeks (my brother and his family are coming in later, such are the vagaries of scheduling bereavement leave in a government agency). We cooked some favorite things. My mom roasted a chicken and then laughed ruefully and said “I guess it’ll be harder to use a whole one up now” and the day after that, we made a favorite chicken enchilada recipe given us by a former minister of her church who had lived in the Southwest. And she baked a favorite cake of ours (my father was diabetic and we had to be careful about sweets in the house, and also baking was hard while he was so unwell). I think it helped, maybe?

There’s a German word, Kummerspeck, which literally means “Grief-bacon” and is used to refer to the weight you put on while grieving. I had scoffed at that before because the more minor griefs (eg., breakups) I had suffered made me NOT want to eat…..but I know I’ve put on a couple pounds in the last two weeks and will have to explain to my doctor when I go in for my checkup on Tuesday….

And people brought in food – lasagna, and bread, and other things.

And we went out to eat lunch a couple times; before my father’s health failed so much going out to restaurants was a favorite thing and my mom hadn’t been able to do it, really, for six months or more while he was needing her care.

When I spoke to her today after I got home, she noted that even though she had told the ‘church ladies’ who do bereavement lunches she didn’t want them to go to the trouble for the memorial service this fall (we have some people with some specific dietary concerns coming), someone did call her back and suggest a dessert-and-coffee reception before the service and I urged her to have them do that – I have fixed things many times for funeral lunches at my own church and it feels very much like it’s one kindness I can do for the family, and having a piece of cake or a few cookies may make small talk easier in a time when it’s going to be hard.

I admit I always rolled my eyes over the “how to relate to your weird dumb relative who isn’t like you” pieces, or, worse, the “you should refuse to spend time with them or try to harangue them into your viewpoint over the Thanksgiving table” pieces, because my family has a lot of….different…..people in it, and we’ve always managed. You talk about other stuff, that’s all. You talk about how a favorite team is doing or the funny things someone’s kids are doing or you share memories….